Month: July 2020

Comic-Con@Home, day four

Well, today is the last day of Comic-Con@Home. I attended two panels today, one on Will Eisner and the 80th anniversary of The Spirit, and another on Jack Kirby. I’ll admit I zoned out a bit during parts of both of them. The Eisner panel was hosted by Danny Fingeroth. I went to a similar panel hosted by him at NYCC in 2017, so there was a lot of familiar material in it. The other panelists were Denis Kitchen, Paul Levitz, and Dan Schkade. I’m very familiar with Kitchen and Levitz, and they were both on that 2017 panel, but I’d never heard of Schkade. His perspective, as a younger creator, was interesting. He does a strip on Webtoon called Lavender Jack, which I should probably start following. (Of course, I’m already following a couple of other strips on Webtoon, but I haven’t actually gone over to the site or opened the app to read them in months…)

And the Kirby panel was a “Kirby 101” panel, meant to be an introduction to Jack Kirby. That’s absolutely a worthwhile thing to do, but I’m not really the target audience for that, having already read plenty of Kirby comics and gone to several Kirby con panels. (I’m definitely not a Kirby expert, but I’m at least at the “Kirby 201” level…) Anyway, both panels were fun to watch, but I did zone out during both and found myself scrolling through Twitter on my phone and looking at links to other stuff. If I were actually at an in-person con, I’d probably have paid more attention. Going to a couple of good solid comics-related panels is always a good way to close out a con.

I’ve been curious about the economics of this virtual con, and about how much damage canceling the in-person con will do to the Comic-Con organization and to the San Diego economy in general. This clip from a local San Diego TV news report, from when the cancellation was announced, has some pretty big numbers in it. And this article talks a bit about some of the behind-the-scenes stuff involved in dealing with hotel cancellation fees and other financial stuff. And here’s a recent TV clip about the cancellation. I’m really hoping things work out and they get to have a real con next year (even though I probably won’t be able to go to it).

I tried to do my part to help with the economic situation, by spending some money at the virtual con, but I didn’t manage to spend that much. While they included a virtual “con floor” as part of Comic-Con@Home, it was hard to navigate and honestly kind of useless. There’s not really a good way to simulate the experience of wandering a con floor, browsing all the cool stuff and making a bunch of ill-advised impulse purchases. I bought a t-shirt from the official store, and I bought some Rob Hanes comics from Randy Reynaldo. That’s it though. I thought about picking up some stuff from Two Morrows, but every time I think about doing that, I remember how many books and magazines about comics I have sitting around the apartment, unread, and I realize that adding more to that pile isn’t a great idea, even if they’re really good books and magazines. (Ditto for Hogan’s Alley. I keep thinking I should subscribe to that, or at least buy some back issues, then I realize that they’ll just pile up, and I’ll never read them.)

Anyway, it was a pretty good con, given the circumstances. My mood has been up and down for these last four days, and I can’t say that the virtual con has had the same brain-resetting effect that a real con often has on me. But I had some fun getting lost in panels about comics and TV and books and movies, and I guess a little escapism is the best I can hope for out of a stay-at-home long-weekend vacation in the middle of a pandemic. (Speaking of escapism, I also read through most of The Escapist series this weekend too. That was fun.)

Comic-Con@Home, day three

Today is Saturday, and day three of Comic-Con@Home. I did all of my usual Saturday errands and chores this morning, and settled in to enjoy con stuff around lunchtime.

I’m continuing to watch a lot of panels. Yesterday, I watched panels about DC, Marvel, Ray Harryhausen, Jack Kirby, and Netflix’s Dragon Prince. I’m not too excited about anything that DC and Marvel are doing these days. There’s a bunch of stuff that I’m curious about, and might pick up when it gets collected, but nothing that I really want to pick up in single issues as it comes out. Both DC and Marvel and doing big crossovers right now, and I really can’t get enthusiastic about picking up stuff like that anymore. It’s too much of a pain to keep track of all the issues, and it’s too expensive if you buy them all. And they rarely come together as well as you’d hope. The Harryhausen panel was fun. The Kirby panel was Mark Evanier’s usual Kirby tribute panel, this time with Alex Ross as a special guest.

I watched last night’s Eisner presentation this morning. That was a little weird. It was mostly just Phil LaMarr reading the nominees and winners. I realize that there’s not much else they could do, all things considered. It would have been cool if they could have found a way to do it live, and bring in the winners in real time for acceptance speeches. The Hall of Fame inductees did get to make speeches, and I enjoyed Maggie Thompson’s speech. (And I might have teared up a bit. Don and Maggie’s CBG was a big part of my formative years.) It might have been good for them to acknowledge and apologize for the voting glitch they had too. Anyway, here’s a list of the winners. There’s a lot of good stuff in there. (Most of which I haven’t read yet.)

So far this afternoon, I’ve watched another DC panel, a Saturday morning cartoon panel, and an Inglorious Treksperts panel. And there are a few more I’ll probably watch before the end of the day. The Trek panel was fun. The guys from the panel have done a bunch of “Starship Smackdown” panels at past cons, and I’ve gone to several of those. I honestly didn’t realize that they’d started a podcast. I should probably subscribe to that.

Overall, I’ve been having fun with the con, though it’s bittersweet, knowing that I probably won’t be able to attend a con in person any time soon.

Comic-Con@Home, day two

My first day of Comic-Con@Home went pretty well. I watched a total of six panels, which is probably a bit more than I’d get to at a real con. I complained yesterday about not being able to watch the Star Trek panel on my TV. That was the only one that was blocked in that way, so I watched all the others on my TV, from my couch. So that’s definitely more comfortable than typical convention center folding chairs. (Edit: this is probably why I couldn’t watch that Trek panel on TV.)

I didn’t do much in the way of creatively simulating a con environment, or doing anything special to get me in the right “con mood,” though I tossed a few ideas around. I remembered there being a “comic con jukebox” episode of Paul Dini’s old Radio Rashy podcast, and I think I found the entry for it, but the audio file itself is gone. That would have been fun to listen to.

I’m starting out today pretty much the same way I started yesterday: still getting up at 6 AM and eating my usual boring breakfast of cereal, a banana, and coffee. I had some ideas about getting creative with breakfast on my days off, but they went down the drain when faced with my usual morning pre-coffee headache. I did manage to find an old San Diego con shirt to wear today, from the 2002 con blood drive.

Here’s a list of the panels I watched yesterday:

  • Star Trek Universe — As I mentioned yesterday, the Discovery table read was a bit weird, but fun. The stuff about the new Lower Decks show looks interesting. I kind of want to watch that now. And I skipped out on most of the Picard stuff, since I still haven’t seen the first season and didn’t want anything spoiled. I should really give in and sign up for CBS All-Access, but I’m still being stubborn about that.
  • Oddball Comics — This was probably my favorite panel. It was really just Scott Shaw!’s usual Oddball Comics slideshow, which I’ve seen several times before. I guess the familiarity of it was comforting. And it’s the kind of panel that translates well to YouTube. it’s just Scott talking over a slideshow. I do miss the audience laughter, but it’s still a really fun presentation and it really took me out of my own head for a while.
  • Humanoids Legacy — This was hosted by Humanoids, so it was of course a promotional panel to some extent, but it was still a good discussion of the history and influence of Humanoids, with a few really good creators, including Mark Waid, Brian Bendis, and Mark Russell. I bought this Humanoids Humble Bundle yesterday too. I already have two copies of The Incal, so I don’t really need a digital copy, but it can’t hurt. And I don’t have most of the other stuff in the bundle, and a lot of it looks pretty good.
  • Twenty Years of Harry Dresden — This was a one-on-one discussion with Jim Butcher. It was pretty low-key, but enjoyable. I’m four or five books behind with the Dresden series, but it is a favorite of mine. I need to get back to it and catch up.
  • Bugs Bunny’s 80th Anniversary — This was a promotional panel by Warner Bros for an 80th anniversary Bugs Bunny Blu-ray set, but it was a lot of fun. The panel included three voice actors who’ve all voiced Bugs. And it included Jerry Beck and Leonard Maltin, who are both quite knowledgeable about animation history. The Blu-ray set is coming out in the fall, I guess. It looks interesting, but I’m not sure I really need it. I tend to buy a lot of DVD and Blu-ray sets that I never get around to watching.
  • Superhero Kung Fu Extravaganza — This is another one that was kind of comforting to watch. This is the 23rd time Ric Meyers has run this panel. The online version is a lot different from the in-person ones that I’ve attended, for a number of reasons, but it was still cool to see that he’s keeping this thing going. The in-person version generally lasts two hours (or more) and features a whole bunch of movie clips. For the online version, he obviously has to limit himself to stuff he can get permission to put on YouTube, so it’s mostly promo clips from recent movies. I’m a bit interested in the new Enter the Fat Dragon movie, though maybe not interested enough to buy the Blu-ray. (Again, I need to remember how many Blu-rays I own that I haven’t watched yet, including stuff I’ve bought based on recommendations from previous Kung Fu panels. For instance, I’m looking at a DVD set of Donnie Yen’s Kung Fu Master TV series that’s been sitting on my shelf for at least ten years.)

I have eight panels on my schedule for today. I’ll probably watch five or six of them. Meanwhile, it’s a rainy morning in Somerville, but I should probably still try to get out for a morning walk.

Comic-Con@Home, day one

Today is the first day of my short vacation, “attending” Comic-Con @ Home. I started the day with a number of vaguely creative ideas in my head about how to simulate actually being at a San Diego con. I didn’t actually execute on any of them. I did wear my WonderCon 2019 t-shirt though, so that’s something.

I’m currently watching the Star Trek Universe panel, my first panel of the con. I knew that the panel was going to be prerecorded, and I’m OK with that, but they’ve also done a couple of other things I’m a little disappointed with. First, they turned off comments on the video. I know that YouTube comments are often terrible, but allowing comments would have made it feel more like a real event, with other real fans in the “room”. They also blocked it from being watched on Apple TV or TiVo, so I’m stuck watching it on my computer. I guess that’s a copyright thing, but it’s still weird. If I wanted to make a copy of the panel, it would be way easier for me to do that on my computer than on my Apple TV or TiVo. Oh well. They’re in the middle of a table read of a Discovery episode right now, which is kind of fun, but also kind of pointless. It would be really fun at a live con, but, prerecorded, it’s kind of boring, to be honest. They’re getting into a Q&A now (with questions that they must solicited in advance, I guess). One nice thing about prerecorded video is that I can pause it if I need a break, and I can skip past any boring parts. I’m going to get back to it now, and see if I can single-task for awhile and just watch the video and relax, without having a bunch of other tabs open and switching back and forth to other stuff.

getting ready for Comic-Con @ Home

Comic-Con @ Home has officially started. And I’m done with work for today, so I’m now officially on vacation. There’s not much going on tonight that I’m interested in, so I really won’t start “attending” the con until tomorrow. Looking at old blog posts from today, I see that in 2008 on this day I was getting ready to leave for San Diego the next day. And I see that I didn’t go in 2009, so I guess 2008 was my last year until I lucked out again in 2012. And I know 2012 was the last time I went. So I guess it’s kind of cool that I get to participate, to some extent, this year.

The souvenir book for this year has been posted as a free PDF. And they have a bunch of other PDFs posted here, including a do-it-yourself badge and some door signs. So if you want an official SDCC restroom sign, you can print one out. I’m slightly tempted to do that, but that would just be silly. They also have an odd selection of recipes posted here. Pretty much all of those are… a bit much. But hey, it’s all in fun.

I’ve been trying to think of things I can do to make my Comic-Con @ Home mini-vacation feel more like a real vacation, and I’m not coming up with much. I’ll probably spend tomorrow morning just reading comics and relaxing, then watch some panels in the afternoon. That’s good enough for now, I guess. Maybe I can get some Mexican food. That’ll help.

One aspect of SDCC that definitely can’t be recreated at home, in NJ, is the weather. We’ve been having a heat wave this week, with temperatures in the 90s and high humidity. And we’re currently in the middle of a thunderstorm that’s caused my electricity to blink out twice so far. Meanwhile, San Diego is in the low 70s and partly cloudy. Well, hopefully, I won’t lose electricity (or internet) entirely. That would make for a pretty rotten con!

Audible adventures

I’ve been trying to get through the audiobook of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I bought a copy from Audible several years ago, with Joe Morton narrating. (I don’t remember why I bought it. It might have been free, or on sale for 99 cents or something.) I started listening to it in June, as part of my Great American Read Goodreads group. It was going fine, but some time in mid-June the Audible iOS app started crashing on me. It would work for maybe 30 seconds, then crash. I contacted Audible support about it on Twitter, and they said it was a known issue and they were working on it. A month later, though, the app is still crashing on me. The Audible app on my iPad still works, though, so I’ve been using that to listen to it. It’s a little inconvenient, but not really a problem.

So the point of this blog post isn’t to complain about Audible, but rather to discuss some of the alternative ways of listening to Audible books that I found while trying to work around my little problem. I thought a few of them were interesting, and the whole topic ties back to my post on iOS audiobook players from 2015. That post was mostly about DRM-free audiobooks. For Audible, I assumed that their files would be DRM’d and not really usable outside of the official app, but it turns out that there are a lot of options.

First, there’s a page on the Audible web site listing most of the ways you can listen to their books. One thing I noticed right away is that it’s still possible to link iTunes and Audible and listen to your Audible books in the Apple Books app. (A long time ago, this was the main official way of listening to Audible books. You’d link your iTunes account to Audible, download the books, and then sync them to your iPod. This was before Apple started selling audiobooks themselves, and before iOS apps were a thing.) So I went ahead and did that, but, as you can see in my screenshot, the version that comes down to iTunes is broken up into chapters differently from the Audible version, and the chapters aren’t labelled in any way that would let me figure out where I left off in the official Audible app. (I also brought up the iTunes version in Undulib on my iPhone, and that worked and at least showed the chapter numbers. But there are about 150 “chapters” in the iTunes version and 25 chapters in the actual book, so having those numbers doesn’t really help.) So, anyway, pulling Audible books into iTunes is probably a reasonable thing to do if you haven’t already started the book and need to figure out where you left off. But the Apple Books app is also probably less user-friendly than the Audible app, so there’s no real reason to do that, unless you’re unable to use the Audible app for some reason.

Another possibility I stumbled across is OpenAudible. This is a shareware product that lets you download books from Audible and convert them to MP3 or M4A. I initially thought that this meant that they were working around DRM somehow, but, going back to the Audible site, I see that they do apparently support downloading their books in MP3 format and transferring them to a generic MP3 player, via an app called AudibleSync. So I guess that OpenAudible is probably just taking advantage of whatever mechanism AudibleSync uses. So maybe it’s not doing anything too shady. (I haven’t tried it.)

Finally, I realized today that I also own a Kindle version of Invisible Man, so downloading that to the Kindle app on my iPhone would let me also download the Audible version and listen to it that way, with the Audible Narration feature. I will probably give that a shot, as the Kindle app seems to know where I left off, and I guess that would let me go back to listening to it on my iPhone.

I don’t have an Audible subscription, but I do own about a dozen Audible books, most of which were either free or bought on sale for a buck or two. (And I haven’t listened to most of them.) So if I can’t ever get the Audible app working on my phone again, at least I now have some other options!

Audible
Books
Kindle
Twitter
Undulib

thinking about Comic-Con

I’m continuing to torture myself by looking at the “on this day” widget in the sidebar of this blog, and the “on this day” view in my Day One journal. The last time I went to SDCC was 2012, and it was going on right now! (And, looking at my journal, I see that, two years ago today, I went to the library and checked out a couple of books, and also went to a Somerset Patriots baseball game. Sigh. Eventually, I’ll be able to do those things again…)

I’ve got my schedule all planned out for Comic-Con @ Home next week. I’ve bookmarked about 35 panels total, from Thursday through Sunday. I’m not sure how many I’ll actually watch, but I’ve got plenty to choose from. I think it’ll be fun. I’ve also been getting myself in the mood a bit by reading some stuff that’s related in some way to the con. I read some issues of Rob Hanes Adventures last weekend, which I bought directly from Randy Reynaldo at that 2012 SDCC I mentioned above. (I’m not sure why I let them sit in my “to be read” pile for so long. It’s a fun series, and the issues are all basically “done in one” stories.) I plan on checking out his virtual booth this year, and maybe picking up all the issues that have come out since 2012.

And I also recently read an Usagi Yojimbo trade paperback. I didn’t buy that particular volume at a San Diego con, but I have bought a number of past volumes directly from Stan Sakai at cons, and I usually see him in San Diego, either at his booth or on a panel. I haven’t heard anything about Stan doing anything for Comic-Con @ Home, but I do know that he’s supposed to be on Mark Evanier’s Groo chat this Thursday, so I’ll probably watch that.

In less pleasant comics-related news, the Warren Ellis thing that I’ve mentioned previously has kind of blown up, with a new website going up this week aggregating the stories of many women who say they have been “targeted and manipulated” by Ellis. The website is… a hell of a thing. It even includes a bar chart graphing the number of women he was involved with per year, from 1999 to 2020. (Peak year: 2009, 22 women.) There’s some coverage of it on The Beat and in The Guardian. I joked about burning my CBLDF t-shirts recently, after the Brownstein thing. I’m not really ready to burn my Warren Ellis comics, but I think I might feel a little differently about them now. I’m not really sure that Ellis ever really understood what he was doing? Or understood how much he was hurting people? I don’t know. I can’t really see him as a super-villain or evil genius. I mean, he was clearly being dishonest with people. (You can’t have 22 girlfriends at once without lying to several of them, at least, I think.) I said in my previous post that I wasn’t sure how to feel about this, and I’m still not. This is all outside my areas of expertise…

Anyway, I need to keep this stuff out of my head and concentrate on positive stuff. Like the fact that NJ is still in the green on the CovidActNow map. (One of only three states in the green! Hope more states join us soon!) Or the fact that there are new Stargirl and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episodes coming out this week!

moving and resizing windows in AutoHotKey

One of the minor little issues I’ve had since this whole “work from home” thing started is that I frequently need to switch back and forth between using my laptop on its own vs. remoting into it from my desktop PC. I always need to be connected to our work VPN, and we’re not allowed to install the VPN client on personal PCs. And I don’t have an easy way to connect my personal monitor, mouse, and keyboard to the laptop. (Yes, I know there are a bunch of reasonably easy ways to do that. I just haven’t made the effort.) So I spend most of the day remoted in to the laptop via RDP from my desktop PC. But I disconnect and use the laptop directly whenever I need to be in a meeting, so I can use the camera and microphone. (And, yes, there’s probably a way for me to use the camera and mic while remoted in, but I haven’t bothered to try figuring that out either.)

Anyway, the issue with all that is that the change in resolution between the laptop screen and my desktop monitor confuses things, so my window sizes and positions are generally all screwed up when I do that. So I wanted to write a little AutoHotKey script to automatically move and resize the windows for my most commonly-used programs. (In my case: Outlook, OneNote, and Firefox. I do my actual development work via RDP into a VM, not on my “real” computer, so it’s just the productivity stuff running on the laptop.)

Of course, given the way these things tend to go, I just lived with it until June, when I finally got around to writing the script. And, again, of course, I found issues with the script, but didn’t bother correcting them until… today. So here’s a script that looks at the current monitor’s resolution, then moves and resizes Outlook, OneNote, and Firefox so they’re tiled and just the right size for my preferences.

SysGet, Mon1, Monitor
;MsgBox, screen dimensions: %Mon1Right% x %Mon1Bottom%

X := 70
Y := 32
Width := Mon1Right - 240
Height := Mon1Bottom - 150
;MsgBox, X=%X%, Y=%Y%, Width=%Width%, Height=%Height%

WinRestore, ahk_exe OUTLOOK.EXE
WinMove, ahk_exe OUTLOOK.EXE,, X, Y, Width, Height
WinRestore, ahk_exe firefox.exe
WinMove, ahk_exe firefox.exe,, X*2, Y*2, Width, Height
WinRestore, ahk_exe ONENOTE.EXE
WinMove, ahk_exe ONENOTE.EXE,, X*3, Y*3, Width, Height

Nothing fancy, but it does what I need, and I thought it might be useful to post it here. It’s using the SysGet command to get the screen dimensions, and the WinMove command to move the windows.

I also considered using PowerShell with WASP for this, but I’m more familiar with AHK.

Comic-Con @ Home

Today, I went ahead with my plan to take a couple of days off from work for Comic-Con @ Home. (I put in for Thursday and Friday off.) They posted the Thursday schedule today, and it’s got some good stuff, including some old favorites like Scott Shaw’s Oddball Comics and Ric Meyers’ Kung Fu Extravaganza. I’ve managed to find stuff to keep me busy from 10 AM to 7 PM. That’s PDT of course, so that’s 1 PM to 10 PM my time. I guess I need to find something else to keep me busy on Thursday morning. (I’ll probably spend the morning reading comics!)

In other comics news, I enjoyed watching Mark Evanier’s talk with Peter David last night. I missed seeing it live on Tuesday, since it was on too late for me (10 PM). They talked about a lot of stuff, including memories of old San Diego cons, so that was fun. I know Mark will be doing some panels for Comic-Con @ Home, but I don’t see any on the Thursday schedule. He’s specifically said he’s not doing a Quick Draw panel, which is kind of a bummer, but I can understand why he’s not doing it. It would be technically difficult, and it wouldn’t be nearly as fun without a live audience.

In yet more comics news, this article at The Comics Journal site goes into even more detail on the CBLDF situation. I said previously that I wasn’t quite ready to burn my CBLDF t-shirts, but now maybe I am. I think it’s going to be some time before the CBLDF earns back anyone’s trust.

On a more positive note, this article about Carol Kalish has been getting a lot of attention. It’s good to read about somebody who was almost universally admired. (By the way, I’ve noticed that any article about comics that talks about somebody “you’ve never heard of” is always about somebody I’ve definitely heard of, and probably know a lot about. This is probably because I’m old, and I’m a nerd.)

And in one bit of COVID-19 news, the company I work for has pushed back our “return to office” date from early August to early September. I was starting to worry about that August date, given how things have been going in NJ and across the country. (I kind of doubt that things will be much better in September, but here’s hoping. And if things aren’t better by then, maybe they’ll give up and just let us work from home for the rest of the year.)

physical media and lockdown anxiety

I’ve now reached the stage of the lockdown where spending $100 for four Avengers movies on Blu-ray seemed like a good idea. (I already have the first one on Blu-ray, but none of the others.) I’d been keeping an eye on iTunes and Vudu to see if maybe the digital versions would go on sale for $10 each or something like that, but yesterday, I decided that it was OK to just go ahead and get the fancy SteelBook box set.

I go back and forth with my thinking on digital vs physical media. On the one hand, my cable & internet went out last night, while I was watching a Blu-ray, so I patted myself on the back for still holding onto physical media there. On the other hand, I accidentally knocked over a big stack of DVDs this morning and had to pick them all up and get them back in order. You can’t knock over digital video. I guess I’ll still keep going back and forth on this for the foreseeable future. There’s an argument to made on both sides.

I have been feeling lately like the lockdown is starting to get to me. I’ve seen some articles about post-lockdown anxiety recently. I think my main problem is that I’m pretty sure we shouldn’t be talking about “post-lockdown” yet at all. I see a lot of people without masks wandering around downtown these days, and I keep reading about the pressure to open stuff back up. I think we need to be real careful about that, and I think we at least need to be wearing masks more often. As of today, NJ is requiring people to wear masks outdoors, so that’s good, though there’s really no enforcement mechanism for this.

And I’m pretty steamed about movie theater chains suing NJ. This really seems like the last thing they should be spending time and money on right now. I’m fairly sure I won’t be entering a theater any time before the end of this year. And I probably won’t want to go into one until next summer, at least. (Assuming there’s a vaccine and/or treatment for COVID-19 by then.)

Some of my anxiety and restlessness is no doubt coming from the simple fact that it’s summer, and I really can’t do most of the things I like to do in the summer. Like going out to see a movie. Or going into NYC and visiting the Met and MoMA. Or going to a comic con. To address that last one, I’m thinking about taking a few days off for Comic-Con@Home later this month. Just sitting around in my apartment and watching panels online won’t come near the experience of actually being in San Diego for the con, but at least it’ll get me away from work for a few days and maybe let me recharge my batteries a bit (so to speak).

They have the Wednesday panel schedule up now, and it’s mostly not that interesting to me. It’s mostly serious stuff related to education. Which is fine. I assume the nerdier fan stuff will be Thursday through Sunday. So maybe I’ll take Thursday and Friday off from work and just chill and watch panels and read comics for a couple of days. I’ve been thinking about other things I could do to make the experience feel more like actually being at the con. I could skip my usual meal habits and get take-out on those days. Maybe I could even find some local take-out that reminds me of the kind of stuff I like to eat in San Diego, like fish tacos. I could sleep a little late and stay up a little late. (Or I could even try to switch to PDT for a few days.) Maybe I could try to ignore “regular” news for a few days and just read con-related news only. (That might be kind of hard to manage.) I guess that’s about it though. I can’t dress any more casually than I’m already dressing. I can do an excessive amount of walking, I guess, but just wandering around Somerville isn’t the same as wandering around downtown San Diego and the convention center.